Hyde society

Most people may know it as Obama's 'hood, but locals have long known the Park's perks

November 19, 2008|By Alexia Elejalde-Ruiz RedEye

The next president of the United States lives in a stately red brick house on South Greenwood Avenue, across the street from a synagogue, just over the Hyde Park border in a tony section of Kenwood.

For anyone who has tried to catch a glimpse of the Obama family abode in recent months, that's about all you get. Concrete barricades and around-the-clock security prevent anyone from driving or walking down Barack Obama's block. Since the election, cars are barred from going down a three-block stretch of Hyde Park Boulevard, across the street from which pedestrian tourists futilely angle for a decent photo of the now-historic home.

Obama's historic presidential campaign has put Chicago in the spotlight, and the glare shines brightest in the Hyde Park area, which has seen an influx of guys in flak jackets, foreign media and tourists looking to buy Obama souvenirs in his very own neighborhood.

Now that the Illinois Tourism Bureau has updated its three-day "Presidential Trails" getaways to include Obama's haunts, Hyde Park-Kenwood can expect the attention to swell.

"This is a huge opportunity for us to characterize just what's special about Hyde Park and the University of Chicago, and to not be a flyover for people who only care about what's on the coasts," said Bob Rosenberg, associate vice president for communications at the University of Chicago.

"I always felt like I was a Hyde Parker, not a Chicagoan," said Hyde Park native Laurel Stradford, owner of What the Traveler Saw, a store on 55th Street that sells accessories from Stradford's world travels.

People are friendlier, more willing to chat, more eager to get to know their neighbors, Stradford said. When she lived downtown after grad school, "I don't think I got to meet half a dozen people," she remembers.

The "Cheers"-like sensibility thrives in the racially mixed community. Hyde Park's population is equal parts black and white and has a sizable Asian presence -- an anomaly on the South Side, which is overwhelmingly African-American.

And while many of its neighboring communities are impoverished and struggling to climb out of decay, Hyde Park boasts multimillion-dollar homes and a robust middle class along with low-income residents in public housing. A study released this year by DePaul University declared Hyde Park the most income-diverse neighborhood in Chicago. (Not that it isn't pricey; a typical one-bedroom rents for $900 a month, said James Daughrity, a sales and leasing consultant at Apartment Finders' Hyde Park office. The median cost to buy a condo or townhouse is $205,000, according to the Chicago Association of Realtors.)

Hyde Park's diversity is a major selling point.

Heather Dalmage, sociology professor at Roosevelt University, moved to Hyde Park specifically so that her young children, who are of mixed race, could grow up in a diverse environment.

"When you're a mixed family, you can't live in a whole lot of places comfortably," said Dalmage, who is white and whose husband is black.

Hyde Park has "a different sensibility," Dalmage said. "You have more freedom. You're less likely to be stared at, or for people to make comments."

Still, tensions exist.

John Edgerton, a University of Chicago Divinity School student who grew up in Hyde Park, notes that while the neighborhood is diverse, the university is mostly white (just 7 percent of undergrad students were black in 2007), and fear of crime among some students lines up along racial lines.

"Because we are positioned amid very depressed areas, there is a great deal of fearfulness about crime and violence that is being blamed on surrounding black communities," Edgerton, 26, said. The murder last year of Senegalese grad student Amadou Cisse happened in Woodlawn, just a couple of blocks south of the Hyde Park border.

Gabriel Piemonte, editor of the Hyde Park Herald, remembers his own hesitance about moving to Hyde Park from Rogers Park nine years ago.

"All of my friends were like, 'You can't live on the South Side. You're not going to like it,' " Piemonte said. But the fine bookstores and beauty of the lakefront's Promontory Point drew him in, and "over time, it was the people," Piemonte said.

"This is the kind of place where you can sink your roots," Piemonte said. "This is a neighborhood people care about and are committed to."

People care a lot, and any proposed changes tend to provoke lengthy debate among residents with differing ideas about how things should be. ("Probably," Piemonte says, "we're a neighborhood that takes itself too seriously.")

Duane Powell, who works at Dr. Wax record store in the Harper Court shopping center, misses the days when people from all walks of life filled the courtyard to play chess late into the night and teach young people the game. The chess tables were removed in 2002 because of concerns the area was drawing drug and gang activity.